The Juggler

[Click here to go to my thoughts after a
second viewing of The Incredibles, or here to read feedback about the film and my review.]

In Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age,
I wrote about Walt Disney's triumph with Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs in these terms:

"After two years of intensive labor, Walt Disney stood early
in 1938 on the threshold of an enormous popular successthe
best kind, gained not by pandering to his audience but by trusting
that it would respond to what moved and excited Disney himself."

I
go to see big-studio animated films because I believe such triumphs
are still possible. Today's animated films, like most movies of
all kinds, are vast collaborative efforts, involving hundreds of
artisans and staggering amounts of money, and they must entertain
tens of millions of people if they are to pay for themselves. Despite
the overwhelming incentivesstronger today than ever beforeto
approach filmmaking as just another kind of manufacturing, some
artists who make big-studio films still try to speak from the heart
to the individual members of their huge audiences, just as Walt
Disney did in his glory days.

It's also true, of course, that many animation studios have purged themselves
of such ambitions.

Early this fall, just before DreamWorks' latest computer-animated
movie, Shark
Tale, opened, I had dinner at a Mexican restaurant next
to a table where a family of six was talking about that movie. They
were obviously looking forward to seeing it. As I overheard scraps
of their conversation, it became evident that their leisure time
was dominated by new movies like Shark Tale, as well as by
new DVDs, new television shows, and, I would guess from the ages
of the youngest members of the family, new pop music, new video
games, and so on. If books played any role in their livesI
heard none mentionedI'm sure they were the latest bestsellers.
As best I could tell, the whole family lived culturally in an Eternal
Now, where noisy, shallow entertainments gave way constantly to
replacements that were only superficially distinguishable from their
predecessors.

America's pop-culture industry has worked very hard in recent years
to create an audience that values newness and not much more. Shark
Tale was targeted at that audience, and successfully so, to
judge from its box-office receipts of more than $150 million. The
film's plot echoes much older storiesit's a deep-sea combination
of The Brave Little Tailor and TheReluctant Dragon,
with fish as the charactersbut the real point of the film
is its thick coat of pop-culture borrowings.

As
in Shrek 2, DreamWorks' other animated hit from 2004, there's
no satirical purpose behind Shark Tale's unceasing invocations
of recent pop music and live-action movies; the borrowings serve
only to feed the self-regard of the people who consume such stuff,
and who presumably enjoy having their taste validated. Unlike the
thinly camouflaged "parodies" in Shrek 2, the product
placements for Krispy Kreme and Coca-Cola in Shark Tale are
as blatant as a thumb in the eye. There's a fart gagobligatory
by now in any DreamWorks filmbut this time it's underwater,
no doubt sending into raptures every kid who has passed gas in the
bathtub. In other words, everything is the same as before in DreamWorks
films, only more so. Technically, too, Shark Tale feels like
a step forward from Shrek 2. In particular, the surfacescruddy
whale tongue, velvety sharkskinhave been even more precisely
captured.

One of the many striking things about The
Incredibles, Brad Bird's new Pixar feature about a superhero
family, is that it turns its back so emphatically on that trademark
DreamWorks preoccupation with surfaces. The hero's and the villain's
huge jawswhich would be decorated with stubble and blemishes
if this were Shrek 3are defiantly smooth, apart from
subtle modeling that goes only as far as needed to suggest flesh,
rather than plastic or metal.

Bird, who previously used computer animation only in support of
the hand-drawn variety in The Iron Giant, has made his inexperience
work in his favor. He has asked that the technology not give him
what it can already do well (those convincing surfaces) but, instead,
that it give him what he needs to tell his story as he wants to
tell it. He seems to take his collaborators' technical expertise
for granted, and he reins it in, as with those smooth jaws, when
its full exercise doesn't suit his purposes. At every critical point,
Bird has made artistic decisions that clearly reflect his own wishes.

As a result, The Incredibles is, if not one of those triumphs
I spoke of at the beginning of this piece, close enough that there's
no reason to quibble. It's the best of Pixar's six features, and
the first computer-animated feature I've seen that gives me hope
that the medium may eventually have the same capacity for artistic
expression as hand-drawn animation.

Bird surely deserves most of the credit for this breakthrough,
and probably all of it. Whereas Shark Tale is the product
of essentially anonymous filmmaking-by-committeethe credits
show three directors and three producers, under the malign guidance
of executive producer Jeffrey KatzenbergBird's name is alone
on the screen as writer and director of The Incredibles,
as is John Walker's name as producer. To see those names naked on
the screen is rather like hearing that familiar claim of personal
responsibility for political commercials"I'm candidate
X and I approved this message"but knowing that it means
something, for a change.

As personal as it is, though, The Incredibles is also a
big-budget action-adventure film, and so Bird has had to take his
audience's expectations fully into account. He has no choice but
to swim in the same toxic pop-culture soup in which his competitors
at DreamWorks have eagerly immersed themselves; he is competing
with Jerry Bruckheimer, after all, not with John Ford. What is so
heartening about The Incredibles is that Bird has shown that
it's possible to be fully aware of today's degraded pop culture,
and to respect its mistreated audience, without surrendering to
the culture in the way that the DreamWorks people have.

In the design of Bird's charactersthe Incredibles themselves,
and their supporting castthere is none of DreamWorks' heedless
urge to recreate the real world in a particularly ugly form. Unlike
all the previous Pixar features, The Incredibles has a cast
made up entirely of ostensibly human charactersan invitation
to disaster, one might think, because the look of real human skin
has always defeated computer animators, for clearly identifiable
technical reasons. The answer, the new film says, is not to keep
butting one's head against that particular wall but to come up with
characters who are persuasively human, but whose skin doesn't need
to look real.

That strategy didn't involve making the Incredibles look more "cartoony."
There are any number of "cartoony" human characters in
The Incrediblesthe costume designer Edna Mode, Mr.
Incredible's boss at the insurance company, a government agent who
looks like Richard Nixonand they are, for the most part, less
convincing than the Incredibles themselves, who are, at first glance,
far more bizarre-looking. Mr. Incredible, aka Bob Parr, is a hulking
Art Deco sculpture of the thirties come to life, and his macrocephalic
wife, Helen, and daughter, Violet, recall lots of bad advertising
art (I kept thinking of Harry and Harriet Homeowner, the big-headed
mascots of the old Hechinger's hardware chain). In Helen's case,
there are also strong suggestions of bendable, posable dolls, since
she is, after all, Elastigirl.

Bird's designs banish distracting associations, with real human
actors as well as with hand-drawn humans of the kind that have populated
many other animated features; he then works very swiftly to establish
the characters' reality in other ways, through beautifully staged
action and, most importantly, through their responses to one another.
By the time the Parrs get up from the dinner table, they have become,
like the Simpsons (Bird's work on that show was surely helpful here),
a family that may look odd but is totally familiar otherwise.

One reason I disliked The Iron Giant, Bird's highly praised
1999 feature, was that the character designs seemed scrawny, their
capacity for expression deliberately suppressed, perhaps in unfortunate
emulation of Japanese anime. Surprisingly, given his long career
in hand-drawn animation, his characters in The Incredibles
are not just three-dimensional in the narrow sense, but they also
show a capacity for individual expression that goes beyond anything
in The Iron Giant. The stylization that is so often paralyzing
in hand-drawn animation turns out to be liberating in computer animation;
when characters must move in three dimensions, a stylized design
can force their movements away from conventional poses and gestures.

The Parrs behave like a real family throughout the film, and so
there's no need for them to proclaim their love for one another
in plumped-up scenes with fraudulent music. TheIncredibles
is the first Pixar feature that does not stray into sentimentality
of the kind that all but wrecked Finding Nemo. (I realized
after the film was over that I had no specific memories of its score,
only a lingering sense that the music always supported the actiona
sign that the composer, Michael Giacchino, did a superlative job.
His soundtrack is mercifully free of the warmed-over pop songs that
litter the soundtracks of DreamWorks films.)

It's because Bird lays the groundwork so expertly in the first
fifteen or twenty minutes of his film, in both personality and plot
terms, that The Incredibles proceeds smoothly through its
astonishingly long running time of almost two hours. What happens
in the last half of the movie, when the Incredibles confront their
enemy Syndrome on his headquarters island, is problematic not because
of length, but because in many respects it is indistinguishable
from similar sequences in live-action adventures. The technologywhich
has been Bird's friend in the first half of the movie, by helping
him to give his characters life in unexpected waysis his enemy
here because its progress in recent years has been so rapid, to
the point that animated effects can often pass for the real thing.
Bird's characters are emphatically animated, though, and so what's
on the screen sometimes bears an unsettling resemblance to old-fashioned
combination work.

Bird flirts with danger in other ways; I often had the sense that
he was juggling a great many pins at once, occasionally dropping
one or letting it come perilously close to the floor. For example,
the riskiness of his character designs was brought home to me in
the occasional scene in which Helen Parr, Elastigirl, is seen from
the rear; when her face is not visible, the strangeness of her body
is disconcerting.

And then there are the characters' voices. They're terribly important
to the success of TheIncrediblesnot because
they're big-star voices, like those in Shark Tale (which
invite a gee-isn't-that-Renee-Zellwegger response), but because
the voice acting is so good. If the Parrs seem to be a real family,
it's thanks in large part to Craig T. Nelson and Holly Hunter, who
play Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl. Bird must be given a great deal
of the credit for the excellence not just of their voice acting,
but of the voice acting throughout the film. His own performanceas
the voice of the outrageously accented designer Edna Mode, a sort
of miniature Dr. Strangeloveis vividly colored, and clearly
he knows how to get what he wants from voice actors. Here again,
Bird's involvement with The Simpsons may have been an important
influence; but it also may have encouraged him to let the voices
do a little too much of the work.

Bird has also dropped one of his pins, I think, by mistaking his
amusing central conceitthat the Incredibles and other superheroes
have been forced into a sort of superhero protection program by
a wave of lawsuits arising from their rescues of ungrateful citizensfor
a serious idea. His superheroes are persecuted, the film says, because
they're truly exceptional in a society (by implication, the one
we live in) that pretends that everyone is exceptional and thus
exalts mediocrity. Syndrome, the villain, is not just a diabolical
killer but a determined leveler. When Mr. Incredible says, "They
keep finding new ways to celebrate mediocrity," he is clearly
speaking for Bird himself, a director who had to wait until his
forties to enjoy an opportunity like those that came earlier to
lesser talents like Don Bluth and Mark Dindal.

But there's a problem. In most superhero comic books, the hero
acquires his powers through one of several means: an accident (Spider-man,
the Fantastic Four, Daredevil), rigorous mental and physical discipline
(Batman, Captain America), or by being from another planet (Superman,
Hawkman). Only rarely is the superhero's superiority genetic, but
that's the case with the Parrs. From all appearances, they and their
fellow superheroes are mutants, like Marvel's X-Men, and Bird seems
to take it for granted that mutants like the Parrsor anyone
else with superior powersshould be allowed to exercise those
powers. The boy Dash's super-speed thus entitles him to win races
at the expense of boys who are not genetically gifted in that way
but who may have put far more effort into developing whatever gifts
they have. I haven't seen the recent X-Men films or comic books,
but I don't recall that the original X-Men comic books of the sixties
took quite so simplistic a view.

Movies are terrible vehicles for advancing ideas of any kind, except
as propaganda, just as they're weak at revealing individual psyches,
except in character animation of the most sophisticated sort. (What
movies do best is show how people relate to one another.) TheIncredibles is not as tendentious as The Iron Giantin
which Bird assumed a pose of moral superiority to the people who
struggled with the nuclear threat in the fiftiesbut in his
new film, as in the earlier one, he toys with ideas filled with
booby traps for the unwary. This time, at least, it's easier to
shrug off the questionable argument and enjoy the film.

As much as Bird has accomplished in The Incredibles, he
must clear some higher hurdles if computer-animated films are ever
to rival the best of their hand-drawn predecessors. In TheIncredibles, as in the earlier Pixar features, there's no
strong sense of individual animators' contributions. Individual
animators reveal themselves most clearly when they generate in their
characters the illusion of spontaneitythat is, like good actors
of all kinds, they reveal themselves when they reveal their charactersand
I suggested before The Incredibles was released that "to
ask a CGI cartoon to appear spontaneous is like asking the same
thing of a building or an ocean liner." To adopt the language
I applied to stop-motion animation, it seems to me that computer-animated
films are "constructedassembled brick by brick."

That's true of The Incredibles no less than of its predecessors,
although Bird has done everything a director could do to work his
way around that problem. I could make the same point about "construction"
in regard to a lot of hand-drawn films, however. Look at a Disney
or Warner Bros. or Harman-Ising cartoon from the early to mid-thirties,
and there's much the same sense of self-conscious labor, for reasons
that Ward Kimball identified when I spoke with him in 1976:

"Animation is very slow. When you're an actor, you depend
on spontaneity in a scene, and it's hard to work up spontaneity
when you're doing separate drawings The faster you can work,
the more spontaneity, and that was one of the secrets of the early
[Norman] Ferguson animation drawing. He could draw almost as fast
as he could think."

The greatest Disney animators, like Bill Tytla, ultimately achieved
the illusion of spontaneity not by working as Ferguson did, but
by turning the very nature of hand-drawn animation to their advantage.
As I wrote in Hollywood Cartoons: "Careful analysis,
and the painstaking drawing it required, were potentially the threshold
of a much greater subtlety of emotional expression than Ferguson,
so limited in technique, could bring to his animation. What Ferguson
achieved through rough, rapid sketching, other animators might surpass
by first mastering a character's actions and then moving through
them, to the character's emotional life."

It seems likely that such a development now lies ahead for computer
animation. I didn't think so before I saw The Incredibles,
but Brad Bird has made me a believer.

Second thoughts:I saw The
Incredibles again about a week after my first viewing, and I
came away with my favorable opinion of it reinforced. I felt throughout
the film that Brad Bird was pressing hard against the limits of
the medium as it currently exists; watching it is a little like
riding as a passenger in a high-performance automobile with an expert
driver at the wheel. (I did not feel that way in the least while
I was watching Boundin', the lightweight short that preceded
the feature, or the trailer for John Lasseter's Cars, Pixar's
2005 release. Weighed against The Incredibles, the Cars
trailer has a shockingly old-fashioned look. If the film is
very much like the trailer, it could be Pixar's first casualty in
the box-office wars.)

The Incredibles is an amazingly well-directed film, its
action almost always crystal-clear, in contrast to the many live-action
adventure films that lapse into incoherence at critical points.
Bird takes full advantage of the computer's ability to generate
artificial environments, and of the opportunities to move freely
within those environments. It's in the animation of the characters
that the sense of "construction" remains the strongest,
because movement must seem to originate within the characters, not
with the camera or the director, and it doesn't, not quite. As I
said in my original review, Birdlike everyone else who works
in computer animationhasn't found a way to clear that hurdle.

He does come remarkably close in some scenes, though. Not with
the throwaway gestures that others have mentioned, but in animation
of Holly Hunter's dialogue for Helen Parr, Elastigirl. Sometimes
there's a fleeting but powerful illusion that the animation is mirroring
Helen's thought. It's in such scenes, very small in scale compared
with most of the film, that I sense something happening in the animation
that may resemble what I wrote about in my original review, when
I spoke of "first mastering a character's actions and then
moving through them, to the character's emotional life."

(There may well be more such moments in the film than I've yet
noticed, in action scenes especially, as one of my correspondents
suggests: "Pay attention particularly to Dash as he discovers
his powers while being chased by the bad guys. During all the fast-paced
action, there is a lot of great acting in the boy's facial expressionsfrom
fear to amazement to fear to pride to fear, and so on. What made
such action scenes so much better on second viewing is that they
weren't just about the actionthey were about each character
discovering himself or herself, again and for the first time."
I suspect that this is one of those films that will be especially
rewarding during repeated DVD viewings.)

Not everyone cares for Helen. One of my correspondents dismisses
her as "a carping, suburban harpy who seems more interested
in imposing her will on her husband than in fighting crime. The
film is supposed to be an affirmation of family life but instead
presents a nightmare scenario of a henpecked, emasculated husband
tied to a wife who is obsessed with doing him one better and who
belittles him at every opportunity. In real life a couple like this
would end up in divorce court."

I think that's dead wrong. Helen is to me the most real character
in the film, a thwarted career woman who tries to make the best
of her diminished circumstancesafter all, they have been forced
to move more than onceand to encourage her husband, a sullen
romantic, to make the best of them, too, for the sake of their marriage
and their children. Superheroes they may be, but the circumstances
are down to earth (and, I would guess, not entirely unfamiliar in
the animation community). But Hunterand, I assume, Birdmake
it impossible to accept Helen as a feminist saint, because there
is in Hunter's delivery a slight, and ever so slightly alienating,
trace ofwhat? Self-pity, perhaps, or fretfulness, or a combination,
or something else entirely; I can't put my finger on it, but it's
not ingratiating, and not meant to be. Perhaps it was that voice
that triggered my correspondent's rejection of the character. Complexity
in a character all but guarantees that at least a few members of
the audience will be repelled.

Speaking of complexity: This time around, I paid particularly close
attention to the dialogue about "mediocrity," and I'm
afraid I came away more skeptical than before. Bird's thinking on
this point is either terribly muddled or subtle beyond my understanding.
For instance, why would it be a victory for "mediocrity"
if Dash were not to race against boys who are his own age but are
physically vastly different? You might as well say that it is a
victory for "mediocrity" if a college senior is not allowed
to compete against sixth graders. Equating "mediocrity"
with "inferior physical ability," as The Incredibles
does, is simply silly. Any sports nut could call up case after case
of athletes who squandered great natural gifts or, on the other
side, converted modest native ability into impressive achievements
through hard work and determination. Should we scorn the over-achiever
and applaud the arrogant bum?

I'm not even sure that it's a victory for "mediocrity"
when The Incredibles'superheroes are forced to hang up their
uniforms. On the evidence of the film's opening minutes, superheroes
do a heck of a lot of damage, even when they're getting a cat down
from a tree. For that kind of damage to be acceptable, there have
to be supervillains who are capable of inflicting even more serious
damageand, of course, Buddy/Syndrome is exactly that kind
of villain. When the Incredibles vanquish him and his robot, the
populace is quite naturally appreciative, despite the scale of the
havoc that defeating the supervillain has required. But wait a minute...Buddy's
victory over the superheroes is supposed to be a victory for mediocrity...but
how can that be, when Buddy is enormously gifted, albeit evil? Are
we to take him seriously when he says that nobody will be super
when there are no superheroes left? My head hurts...

Oh, the hell with it. Bird is a clear thinker where it counts,
as a storyteller and an artist. He has made what is probably the
most intriguing and stimulating animated film of the last few decades,
and I look forward with great anticipation to whatever he decides
to do next.